Both React and Angular are two of the most popular web and mobile app technologies and hence the comparison still deserves our attention. Both React and AngularJS are advanced, developer-friendly JavaScript (JS) technologies that are used to build interactive single-page applications (SPAs). In spite of the continuous growth in the number of JavaScript frameworks for building single-page applications, these two have dominance in the development world. Hence, they deserve a mutual comparison.

Overview: React and AngularJS

Both React and AngularJS are presently used by too many leading enterprises across niches. For news, entertainment, and travel companies in countries with a vast digitally educated population, these two frameworks are widely used. Both are Model–View–Controller frameworks which are a popular characteristic for most web app projects.

React

Developed by Facebook and widely used across projects React is one of the most popular frameworks to this day. React is powerful, versatile, and highly flexible that allows using its components across multiple projects. React has a slight edge as it is more widely used by JavaScript developers. Most React development services prefer the framework for its low learning curve and reusability of code. It’s actually a library and that is why React library offers a View component but lacks Model and Controller components.

Most Promising Features of React

React offers JSX which is a preprocessor step that allows you to use XML syntax in Javascript. Though implementing JSX with React.js is optional, it is widely used for clean coding.

React fully relies on component-based architecture. The components are combined to render a complete view. Thanks to this maintaining code for large projects becomes easier.

Unidirectional Data Flow and Flux are two other things of React that make it easier when reasoning about the app.

Pros of React

React uses JavaScript objects or DOM that help improve the app’s performance.

React can be used on the client as well as server-side projects.

Thanks to components maintaining larger apps become easier.

Cons of React

It comes with only the view layer of the application. For other layers, web developers need to implement other technologies.

Angular is a powerful JavaScript framework that evolved for several years and has passed through several version updates. Angular is one of the most versatile JavaScript frameworks that comes with an extensive range of features for web app projects. It is feature-rich, powerful, and offers more control over the web application.

Most Promising Features of Angular

Angular is a free and open-source technology.

Angular is used to build sophisticated Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

It is used for client-side applications using JavaScript following a Model View Controller (MVC) protocol.

Angular can handle a browser-specific JavaScript code and this makes the app compliant for different browsers.

Pros of Angular

It allows building single-page apps with optimum quality and performance.

Angular allows data binding to HTML.

The web apps built with Angular are unit testable and allow reusing components.

The key differences between Angular and React can be summed up with the following aspects such as componentization, data binding, performance, dependency resolution, directives, and templates.

Componentization

→ Angular

Angular provides many standardised services, factories, controllers, directives, and several components that a JavaScript developer needs time to master. But once they can master they can use many parts of one project in another.

→ React

React offers a huge JavaScript library that helps developers update the View for the users. React doesn’t allow building applications on its own since it lacks the model and controller layers. For this, we have Flux and its different variants. React allows building a very simple and effective way to develop a tree of components. Because of reusable components and clean coding JavaScript developers adapt to React more easily.

React doesn’t come with the concept of dependency injection. To inject dependencies React developers can use several instruments.

Directives

→ Angular

Angular Directives provide a way to organize our work/code around the DOM. When working with Angular, these directives allow us access to the DOM. Apart from the directives it comes with, developers can create their own directives as well.

→ React

When it comes to React, this division between templates and directives doesn’t exist. The template logic or the directives needs to be written in the template itself. This actually does away with many complications.

Conclusion

When it comes to building single-page web applications, both AngularJS and React are great options. On the other hand, they are totally different tools. Though some developers may comment that React is ahead of Angular or vice versa, choosing any of them really depends on the particular project.

To begin with, React may be a little easier since the old-school JavaScript and HTML code can be enough. But, over time developers need to have a grasp over additional tools such as Flux. In contrast, Angular development expertise mostly revolves around HTML. Angular offers typically an unusual syntax that may be challenging for the beginners.